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Giant Bomb #25 | A Fun Time with Friends

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W

wenis

Registered for GAF on September 11, 2001.
I can't believe the secret windjammers level in the Last Guardian. Tricos power move is crazy.
 
S

Scizzy

Member
I can't believe that Trico falls into a bottomless pit and dies at the end of the game, but then you find a Trico egg and a new one pops out because Tricos are fucking expendable.
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
Salarians said:
I can't believe the real Trico was the Trico we made along the way
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I got tears in my eye

That's beautiful

Trico has been these last 10 years waiting for Trico

~~~

On the other hand, FFXV...
1aFGyqq.gif
 
P

Perfect Cha0s

Member
Finally got around to listening to this week's Bombcast and I'm losing it over Vinny's Windows 10 rant. It's always the best when they're all on the same podcast.
 
P

petethepanda

Member
I've had notifications turned on for a few months now but I always feel a little weird tuning into Jefflr. It's like I'm @-ing into someone's "personal" Twitter thread. Like, it'd love to someday be active to the point where I'm not just some random internet jagoff, but..
 
S

Schopenhauerian

Member
Harpuia said:
I think I groaned for the entire duration of the Death Stranding/Kojima talk this bombcast. Goddamn Brad is such a goddamn downer concerning anything Kojima.
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mnz said:
...MGSV was Brad's GotY last year, too. He can't hate Kojima too much. As someone who is not into Metal Gear outside of Rising, I actually thought it was very intriguing. A whole new creation with Kojima's production value sounds pretty great...
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Human Trashcan said:
But yeah there are SOME good games writers but very few of them write reviews or are actually employed as games writers. Austin's one of the best ones for sure. I adore Jenn Frank's writing, Cara Ellison is great too. Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz are very good. That's just about the extent of my personal shortlist.
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Steven Poole is a pretty interesting writer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Poole
Trigger Happy was published in 2000 by 4th Estate in the UK (with the subtitle "The Inner Life of Videogames") and by Arcade Publishing in the US (with the subtitle "Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution"). It is an investigation of the aesthetics of videogames, that notes similarities and differences with other artforms such as cinema, painting and literature, and finally offers a description of games as semiotic systems that may provoke "aesthetic wonder". In 2007, Poole released a PDF version of the book for free download on his website, calling it an "experiment" in the tip-jar model for writers. In 2013 collection of Poole's Edge columns was published as "Trigger Happy 2.0".
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Incidentally, he had an interesting perspective on MGSV & Kojima. Curious what folks here might think:
https://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/metal-gear-solid-v

...Yet while Kojima’s games are berserk in many ways, they are not the standard kind of first-person shooter in which thousands of indistinguishable enemy grunts (always Middle Eastern or Russian) die at the point of the player’s phallic rifle... In their dynamic procedure as well as their scripted rhetoric, Kojima’s games are stealthily anti-war war games. In contrast to the fairground bullet-shower of the billion-grossing Call of Duty series (the equivalent in war-themed video games of Michael Bay movies)... The player may thus feel dirty and guilty for doing what is mere routine in other games. As well as in other art forms: MGSV’s emphasis on fanatical caution and planning, as well as the humane neutralizing of enemies, works too as an implicit rebuke to gung-ho war movies—in particular, in this case, the Afghanistan-set Rambo III (1988), whose hero deals very differently with the Soviet occupation...

MGSV: Ground Zeroes (2013) saw the hero tasked with rescuing prisoners from a CIA “black site” prison in Cuba... visually the camp was obviously Guantánamo: the prisoners were dressed in orange jumpsuits, some with hoods over their heads and the victims of torture... at one moment, the games will clownishly revel in the clichés of the form; the next moment they will deconstruct those very clichés and force the player to confront real suffering... What Metal Gear Solid is satirizing in particular—almost uniquely for high-budget blockbuster products in this medium, or for that matter in cinema and TV—is so omnipresent in most modern fiction that it almost escapes notice. It is what I have called national-security ideology. Its key tenets are familiar: the enemy is fanatical and unreasonable, while Western government operatives are empathetic heroes; killing civilians with drones is just regrettable “collateral damage” in a righteous mission against the irrational fanatics (as in season three of the TV series Homeland); and torture always works to elicit time-critical information, as in Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Homeland, and of course 24...

In the newest game the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is explained to the player in ways that make the parallels with the later American adventure there inescapable. Briefings on (virtual) audiocassette explain that the army of the USSR has invaded in order to counteract “the spread of Islamic revivalism,” and that “Afghanistan has become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.” Knowing nods to the present day are littered subtly everywhere: in the TV-style opening cast list for the game’s “episodes,” there is a credit for “Enemy Combatants”: a phrase familiar from the Bush-Cheney government’s rhetorical creativity in attempting to avoid acknowledging any “prisoners of war” to whom duties of care would be owed under the Geneva Conventions. Here, the “Enemy Combatants” are the Soviet soldiers, but the casting note works to plant a seed of ambivalence in the player’s attitude towards them...

In the past, the series has had as its satirical targets global conspiracy theories, terrorism scares, and modern military Keynesianism, according to which increased defense spending promotes economic growth—Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) was all about “private military contractors” and the “war economy,” and had the player buy upgraded weapons from a cynically wisecracking arms dealer named Drebin. The hero of all the games, Snake, is always caught up in the madness of a war-obsessed world. Reluctantly, he must make more war to try to stop it... the film Zero Dark Thirty, for example, was predicated on the idea—promoted by insider “consultants” to the movie—that U.S. torture of prisoners resulted in actionable intelligence. (A canard that has been repeatedly refuted.) Some media critics considered this objectionable, yet the conversation was conducted respectfully. An art-film blockbuster can get things wrong, but it is still considered a serious contribution to such debates. A video game is not... Hideo Kojima’s games notoriously combine sharp reflections on contemporary political themes (The Phantom Pain concerns itself at length with issues of nuclear proliferation) with overscripted, didactic longueurs... Yet as a cultural figure Kojima may be... someone who first introduces a player or reader to the iniquities perpetrated in modern history by the “good” guys. In a still-young medium whose most successful products are deeply conservative, he insists that video games can and should convey critical arguments about international relations and jus in bello...
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